Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months%more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics(and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 60th installment.
Of all the comic book series Alan Moore has worked on, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the only one still showing definite signs of life. Because Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill owned The League, they didn’t have to put it to rest like the other comics in the “America’s Best” lineup after Moore’s decisive break with Wildstorm and DC Comics.
Around 2005, Moore had become estranged from DC (again) after a series of incidents beginning with the pulping of an entire print run of an issue of The League a few years earlier—because of the use of an authentic turn-of-the-century advertisement for a “Marvel Whirling Spray Syringe”—and growing antagonism about the V for Vendetta movie and Moore’s increasingly vocal attempts to remove himself from any association with the film along with DC’s mistreatment of Kevin O’Neill as they pressured him to complete Black Dossier and ultimately released a product that didn’t include a planned audio recording. The Black Dossier friction, according to Moore, stemmed from hostilities that erupted when DC Comics learned that Moore and O’Neill were planning to bring their next chapters of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to the much-smaller-scale publisher Top Shelf Productions, once their previously-promised commitments to DC were completed.
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